Prologue

WHOOOOOM. WHOOOOOM. As the pitched alarms sounded Evan grabbed Rosie's hand tighter as they ran for the nearest safe port. Bumped together and nearly jostled apart, the other side of the street couldn't seem farther away as they ran with the crowd of adults to safety.

Everyone had been quiet, lying on the old, cracked asphalt road that was only used by the FEC trucks now. Some of them asleep, others in drugged-out hazes, only watching the pictages as the screens flashed in front of their faces. That all changed as soon as the CVR trucks started rolling through.

Coming before the alarms, the trucks had taken the remaining populace of Growth Zone 298, formerly Buffalo, New York by surprise and all that was left now was run for the nearest safe building. Away from the soldiers, the carnivores and their blue, blue eyes.

Rosie stumbled on the corpse of someone that had wasted away in the drugged out haze the underlords provided. Evan grabbed her around the waist and carried her as he ran. They were both seven, but he was the boy and stronger. He dodged around someone's heavy booted feet running the other way from the crowd. Towards the carnivores, their guns, their drugs. No one tried to stop the idiot.

Evan dropped Rosie as one of her punches finally connected to his stomach. He dropped to the ground gripping his abdomen and someone ran over his back, flattening him to the cracks beneath him, pushing the last of his air out. He barely heard Rosie's scream as she grabbed his hand, then his shoulders as she dragged him to the doorway they were so close to. His knees were still on the step when the explosion went off.

Somehow one of the underlords had been able to rig up something he called a carnie special. It was a Molotov cocktail of whatever could be scrounged from everything machine crap rations and whatever was left in the dirt-cheap homes from the before. None of the underlord's people had been able to return from one such detonation, but that was supposedly the point he said.

Evans ears went white. That was all he could think of to call it. No screaming, no trucks rumbling, no boots or bare feet stomping, running on the ground. Nothing at all to break the white up. Until Rosie spoke up.

"Evan, you lost your shoes."

He looked down at his dirty, now bare feet and felt like crying. He didn't want to find new shoes. New shoes meant having to go to the pile at the back of the growth center. It meant sneaking past carnivores and trying to find a kid like him that had died and still had his shoes. Most had already been snatched by the kids that worked for the underlords. So that meant floppy shoes that made his toes cold.

"Idiot kid's lucky to have feet." The gravely voice came from to the side of the safe zone home.

Evan looked over and saw the dirty, bearded face of Johnathan Elis. Johnathan Elis was a mean old man that refused to be called by anything else. He refused to watch the pictages, take the carnivore's drugs, accept the rations from the everything machine. He was a weird old guy, and always grumpy. Evan had tried to be nice to him, but only every got glared at instead. So now he stuck his tongue out at Johnathan Elis.

"I'd rather have my shoes, thanks."

Johnathan Elis just shook his head and tilted it so he could look out the nearby window without being seen. Evan looked behind him to try and see what Johnathan Elis did. All he saw was a couple carnivores kicking the leftover body bits of the underlord's idiot and the rest sweeping the area, shooting anyone laying about, still with their pictages playing but not moving. The FEC claimed that those that didn't have any will were good for nothing and would every so often make a sweep of the growth zones for the corpses and the people that didn't bother to live anymore. If you didn't want to live, then why stay alive and use up all that extra material that could be put to better use?

Johnathan Elis shook his head. "Kid, believe me. You'd rather have your feet than be one more reason for that machine to keep running."